Which of course brings us back to that pesky old question: Was that his last last day of preschool?

Weeeellll, I don’t think so. I’ve been leaning more and more in the direction of not sending him to kindergarten next year. I’m still not completely positive because I do have moments when I think he should go, but with the exception of my mother (an avid rule follower) and a very few others, everyone has told me not to do it. The most resounding No’s have come from teachers. Not teachers who are saying that Austin himself isn’t ready, but teachers who say that any boy with a borderline birthday isn’t ready.

I guess it comes down to which decision we’d regret more and it seems much more likely that we’d regret sending him and having him struggle as the youngest than holding him and having him be the oldest.

We can register him for kindergarten through August so there’s still a chance he may go, but for now, it’s pre-K for Austin.

Even though he has already mastered a skill that Braedan practiced the entire summer before kindergarten: the monkey bars.

My PTA job doing outreach to the incoming kindergarten families required that I be there for the entire two-and-a-half hour event this evening. I oversaw an art project for the kids who came along with their parents, took families on tours of the building, and answered lots and lots of questions.

But I did not register my own child.

Of course, it’s not too late. I have all summer to register him at the Board of Ed should we change our minds. But for right now, as of this particular day, we will not be sending Austin to kindergarten next year.

Is it the right decision? Who knows. But I do know that it’s not the wrong decision.

OK, this will be my final public mulling over when to send Austin to kindergarten. For a little while at least!

My big issue right now is that I feel like sending him this coming fall is the RIGHT thing to do. Yes, he would still be only four for the first few weeks, but the official deadline is September 30 and he’ll be five by September 30. So unless I have a very good reason, an actual developmental or physical delay, then he should go. (And, amazingly, he doesn’t have any documented or even suspected physical or developmental delays.)

Somebody has to be the youngest kid in the class, so why not Austin? I’m not certain that being the youngest is always a disadvantage anyway. I know plenty of people, both my age and currently in school, who didn’t mind or don’t mind being in that position. In fact, Braedan had a neighbor friend over the other day who is the youngest boy in his fourth grade class, yet another late September birthday. I asked him about it and he said he truly doesn’t care. He said he’s smaller than most kids (but not all) and that some who are even younger are bigger so that’s irrelevant. He does extremely well academically and has no problem fitting in with his peers. He said it hasn’t once been an issue for him thus far in his schooling.

When I spoke with his mom, she said that, back when she was making the decision to send him, a concerned friend said, “But don’t you want him to be a leader?” She said, sure she did, but that he was going to be a leader no matter what. He is a leader. Personality does that, not age. Heck, Braedan could have started kindergarten when he was four and it would have been no big deal. Not that he’s some super genius, but he’s always been emotionally mature and quick to make friends and feel at ease in new situations and he would have done just fine.

So anyway, what I’m saying is that Austin being younger than his classmates by eleven months or ten months or nine months is not a worry for me. So what? There’s automatically going to be a range of kids in a class, some with birthdays up to a year behind the others. What does worry me is the other kids who get held back, the June and July and August kids (boys especially) who would be several months beyond six when they started. It’s that awful “everybody’s doing it” problem. I don’t want to hold him back, but I’m afraid I might because everybody’s doing it. I sort of feel like we get screwed by the people who (in my opinion) should send their kids on time but don’t.

Now I know a lot of you have shared your own experiences with me, both here and in private emails, and I don’t want to offend anyone by having asked your opinion and then saying I think what you did is wrong. And I know that everyone thought carefully about their decisions and of course has every right to make whichever choice they want. But maybe that’s my real issue — maybe I wish we didn’t have the choice. If there was one national law with one national deadline and you simply had to send your kid, then this wouldn’t be an issue for any of us.

But of course it is. You can tell that I would really like to send him, but I will continue to think this over and discuss it with Mark and Austin’s teachers and others. And then, when the time comes, we’ll make the best choice we can and, once we’ve decided, we won’t second guess ourselves and will just live with the consequences. Like we do with all the otherdecisions we’ve had to make.

I have certainly talked this over with his preschool teacher, but that has still left me hovering between my two choices. She thinks that he is ready both academically and socially for kindergarten. Her concern is the much less predictable “What about when he’s 10 or 12 or 16?” I know he’d be fine academically, at least in the early grades (after that, how can any of us predict?). He’s very bright and, because of watching Breadan master reading, has excellent pre-literacy skills.

His social interactions are another matter entirely. How he acts around others when I’m present is drastically different from how he acts when I’m not present. If I’m there, he’s mommy’s little baby, wanting to be held and hanging on to me as I leave. On the days that I parent help, he refuses to talk to anyone, teacher or classmates. But when he’s on his own, without me, he’s just a normal little kid. Somewhat on the quiet side but he definitely has friends and participates in the group activities in an acceptable way.

So, in that regard, I almost think it would be good for him to start school on time (note I did not say “early,” because next year would not be early) because it would allow him to be his “big” self more often. I wouldn’t be around as much and he wouldn’t sink back into me. But of course (flipside), if he really needs that babying time from me, then there’s no reason I shouldn’t give it to him for as long as I can.

My dad said just yesterday, “Give this child every advantage you possibly can, he deserves it.” And there’s no doubt that if I really believed he would suffer by being the youngest, I would hold him back. But I don’t really believe that he’ll suffer — although I know he might suffer — hence my dilemma.

Mark also thinks we should wait. “Why not?” is his reason. And I do actually have an answer for that. In our district, there is an enormous acheivement gap between the lower income students and the higher income students, one that exists prior to school ever starting. Nearly half of the children in Braedan’s school qualify for free or reduced lunch based on national poverty standards. For those families, you send your child as soon as they’re able, late birthday or not. And I don’t mean to imply that these families use school as free, all-day childcare. But it IS free, all-day, high-quality education and why would they not take advantage of that as soon as possible? Austin will start school with many advantages over (some of) his classmates: he’s been read to every day of his life, he’s been exposed to a great many things, ideas and places, he attends a high quality preschool. I’m not entirely comfortable adding yet another advantage on top of that: an extra year of physical and emotional development. Not that I want to “dumb it down,” but it just seems to create unnecessary inequality.

Now many people have said to me that I shouldn’t sacrifice my own child for the sake of the common good. And again, I wouldn’t do it if I believed he was being sacrificed. But I also think that if everyone puts their own personal interests ahead of the common good, then there is no common good!

Hmmmmm, all this being said, I’ve already registered him in the pre-K class at his preschool for next year. And I will also register him for kindergarten next month, just to give us a little more time to decide. He is not much help in the matter — he claims he wants to go when one particular friend, seven months his senior, goes. But that friend’s parents have yet to decide whether he’ll attend our local public school or another parochial school where they attend church, so that certainly shouldn’t be our deciding factor.

And in terms of Austin’s health, there are reasons that go both ways there too. Obviously, if he were to be on dialysis in this next year, I’d keep him preschool so he could do that in the morning and head to the hospital in the afternoon. No point in enrolling him in kindergarten just to pull him out three days a week. But that doesn’t seem to be a pressing issue right now and hopefully won’t become one (knock on wood). We still expect that he’ll need a transplant at some point in the future but most parents schedule those over summer break (really, like instead of two weeks at camp). And if he’s older, he can easily see a hospital tutor to keep him on grade level. So I can’t make a decision based on such unknowns.

And then there’s my personal motivation, which in truth is only a tiny little piece of this. I remember with incredible clarity sitting in the hospital cafeteria with Mark, picking at my breakfast, two weeks before Austin’s first birthday, while he was beginning an eight-hour surgery. And Mark said to me, as gently as he possibly could, in an effort to prepare me for what might lie ahead (not that you can ever be prepared for such a thing), “Honey, you have to wrap your head around the idea that this child will probably not make it to kindergarten.”

I will not rush it for that reason, I promise, but come hell or high water, this child is making it to kindergarten.

You know, it’s sort of funny because last spring and summer when we were dealing with the enormous burden of deciding whether or not to remove Austin’s kidney — and even back into the previous fall and winter when we were dealing with the same enormous burden — I kept saying how I wished I only had “normal” parenting decisions to make. Normal, average everyday dilemmas to mull.

Well, now I have one and you know it’s stressing me out! Ha, be careful what you wish for, right?

Austin will turn five on September 21. Our school district’s deadline for enrolling children in kindergarten is September 30. My natural inclination is to send him when it’s officially his time, which this coming fall would be. I definitely don’t believe in holding him back for any personal gain — so he’ll be bigger or stronger or smarter than his classmates. That’s just not my perogative as a parent — I lean much more towards that happy middle ground for my kids.

So there’s a big part of me that wants to send him, because I feel it’s the “right” thing to do. But, I do worry that it could add an unnecessary strain to his schooling years. He would always always be the youngest and might always feel like he was playing catch-up. Because so many other parents are holding their kids back these days — not just those with September birthdays, but with birthdays as far back as June and July — Austin could be as many as fifteen months younger than his classmates. That’s a really big difference, especially when you’re only four and your classmates are already six.

So I find myself super torn, back and forth, back and forth (just like with that other big decision). It wouldn’t be hard to wait — Austin has another year of preschool he can easily do since he’s not enrolled in the pre-K class this year, so that’s not a factor.

I’m certainly not expecting anyone else to make this decision for us, but would love to hear about your experiences either as parents or as teachers or as the youngest or oldest student you may once have been. Any insight is welcome.

And believe me, I know that if this is my biggest parenting concern right now, I am very lucky indeed.